Last week, the Court of Appeal ruled that I should pay 60% of Arron Banks’s trial costs and one third of his appeal costs. 

Mrs Justice Steyn spent months examining the evidence and found that the talk was clearly in the public interest and therefore lawful at the time I delivered it. That was not challenged in the Court of Appeal. It accepted that I won on the issue that “absorbed most of the time and money”. 

And yet, this ruling means that I will pay a large part of Banks’s costs and sets a terrible and chilling precedent for UK journalism. It shows that the public interest defence - on which journalists rely when publishing challenging stories - doesn’t actually work. Even if you fight for years and successfully establish that your journalism was in the public interest you can still face crippling costs. 

So, following a meeting with my legal team today, we have decided to appeal it.  I will seek permission from the Court of Appeal to Appeal to the Supreme Court, or if that fails we can apply for permission from the Supreme Court. And if that fails, we believe we have a strong case to take it before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.  

The European Convention on Human Rights puts an obligation on member states to ensure freedom of expression. We believe that this ruling violates that right. There is no meaningful freedom of expression - or the press - in this country if a reporter can successfully defend her reporting but still face an enormous bill because of something that happened months or even years after publication.

Donations to this CrowdJustice will go toward paying for the legal costs of continuing this fight. These funds will be used to put toward my own legal costs, both to date and to continue to challenge this. 

Thank you 

 I was shocked and bewildered by the court’s decision last week. But I’ve been enormously grateful - once again -  for the overwhelming number of both private and public messages of support. And the ongoing donations to this crowdfunder.

I spoke to Press Gazette about why I shouldn’t have had to face this alone. But I have. And without this support from you, the public, it simply wouldn’t have been possible to defend myself. The comment piece from editor, Dominic Ponsford, explains why this case matters for all journalists and news organisations. But if the Supreme Court gives us permission to fight it, it will be another costly and time-consuming process. As would going to the European Court of Human Rights.

But this case is now about a far bigger issue than just my reporting on Banks. It has far-reaching ramifications for the rest of the British media. I’ve been part of a long-running campaign to reform Britain’s defamation laws - which the UK government has committed to do - and this ruling has again proved why this is a matter of urgency. Our laws are simply not fit for purpose. Every day, stories on abuses of power are spiked because of legal threats. This ruling will mean even more critical reporting will never see the light of day.

Continued publication

I want to highlight a technical point that is key to concerns about how this case will stifle reporting. The court of appeal found for Banks on one point only: it ruled that when the police concluded its investigation into him a year after I gave the talk, the public interest defence fell away. The court ruled that a notional 100,000 people in the UK saw the talk after this point and it held me liable for those views even though it acknowledged that I did not control TED’s website. 

My legal team

I have been enormously privileged and lucky to have been represented on a conditional fee arrangement by Keith Mathieson and Thomas Otter at RPC and Gavin Millar KC and Aidan Wills at Matrix Chambers. They took a generous risk in doing so and I’m hoping that I will also be able to contribute from here to their fees if I can.